Creativity

For whatever reason, the script ideas seem to be flowing for me. I'm not complaining, but it is creating a logjam.

I've never been a big start-a-script-then-back-burner-it guy. I'm more of a rewrite-the-same-script-endless-times kind of guy.

Anyhow, last fall I had an amusing idea for a comedy, that I brainstormed a lot, and then knocked out about 15 pages off, before getting bogged down in actual work stuff.

Then I came up with an idea for a dark comedy fantasy thriller, and put the comedy to the side to work on that. I came up with a rough storyline, started knocking it out, and even got 25 pages in pretty good shape for my screenwriting group, where they tore it apart, but in a way that made it clear that there was something to the idea. Cool.

But then, a little over a week ago, I started pondering the idea of writing something that can be done for a low budget. Not that I have any desire to direct it myself (I don't), but it seems like everyone is always looking for genre scripts that can be filmed relatively inexpensively, and yet everything I tend to write has something to it that it going to require special effects or at least a butt-load of locations.

So I started pondering what story I could tell, that had minimal locations and only a few characters. And I came up with an idea. And then I thought about it some more, and expanded it, and then came up with a cool twist. And then the ideas started really flowing.

The capper was on Sunday, when I drove up north with my wife; we noodled around the back roads up to Solvang, turned aroud, and came home. And on the drive back, I pitched her the story.

If you can't tell your story to a rapt audience in a car, your story doesn't work yet.

This time it did. I hooked her, she loved the twists, she wanted me to write it. Which isn't something that often happens.

So the other script has been moved to the back-burner; I will finish it someday. But I've got a new obsession.

Stay tuned.